Sixteen years ago, John Higham '41 wrote an essay about Herbert
Baxter Adams, the man who founded the formal study of
history
during his years at Johns Hopkins. Higham wrote of Adams: "His
writing and editing aimed to put different things together."

The same could be said of Higham's work. For more than 30 years,
16 as a professor of history at Hopkins
(1973-1989), Higham studied and elucidated the many ways in which
American culture, for all its diversity and fractiousness, has
hung together. His distinguished career has just been honored by
14 of his former Hopkins students, who have collected some of his
most important essays in a forthcoming book, Hanging Together:
Unity and Diversity in American Culture (Yale, 2001).

John Higham's essays
are collected in a new book initiated by former
students.Photo by
Jay Van Rensselaer

The collection was initiated and edited by Carl J. Guarneri (PhD
'79), now a history professor at St. Mary's College of
California. Guarneri worked with Higham to assemble the roster of
essays and tapped a different former student of Higham's to write
an introduction to each one. All are noted academicians, serving
on history faculties at institutions including Northwestern
University, Franklin and Marshall College, Penn State University,
University of Virginia, Universite Paris VII, and Boston
College.

The essays range in publication date from "The Reorientation of
American Culture in the 1890s," first published in 1965, to
"Three Postwar Reconstructions," which first appeared four years
ago. One piece, "The Long Road to the New Deal," had not
previously appeared in print. What unites the essays, says
Guarneri, is an effort to trace the changing contours of American
culture: "They are unified by a remarkably consistent focus on
the ways a dynamic national culture has caused divergent ethnic,
class, and ideological groups to 'hang together' as
Americans."

Higham has always sought connections. Without dismissing all the
divergences of American culture, he has looked for the enduring
ties that have kept the nation from flying apart. American
society has always revolved around polarities, he says: idealism
and materialism, freedom and organization, the one and the many.
A cultural historian, he argues, should not focus all attention
on the poles and the margins, but should pay attention to the
shifting center that ties everything together. Individual
subgroups should not be studied without considering their ties to
the greater nation, the ways they change society but also benefit
from being part of it.

"Nationalism has various forms," says Higham, who retired from
Hopkins in 1989 but continues his writing and research. "There is
a civic or liberal nationalism. Historically, I look back at the
kind of nation that was developing during the Civil War era, that
Abraham Lincoln exemplified. We need to renew that by opening
ourselves again to the nation as an absolutely valid instrument
for creating a more equal and culturally ambitious homeland.

When Higham began his career in 1948, he says, historians were
forging connections to other disciplines, especially the social
sciences and the humanities. Those connections made possible new
specializations in specific ethnic and racial groups, in gender
studies, labor history, and local studies. Then, in the 1960s,
turmoil and alienation drove many young scholars into these new
specializations, which ended up developing inward-looking
agendas. The ideas of the nation as a whole, made up of all these
contending and ever-evolving groups, fell completely out of
favor.

"Today we are emerging from the negativism of those oppositional
years," Higham says. "The breakup of American history and the
polarization are over." --Dale Keiger

Around the first century B.C., a form of ancient Greek skepticism
known as Pyrrhonism coalesced. For the next few hundred years
(according to the second/ third-century philosopher Sextus
Empiricus, the best surviving source), Pyrrhonists extolled a
sort of serenity attained through the complete suspension of
judgment. They believed that for any question there existed
opposing arguments of equal strength, thus creating myriad
unresolvable disagreements. In the face of these disagreements,
Pyrrhonists withdrew from all attempts to specify the real nature
of things. They simply held no opinions at all, thus rising above
judgments to achieve ataraxia, "freedom from worry."

The Pyrrhonists were so named because they considered themselves
followers of a philosophy first espoused by Pyrrho of Elis in the
fourth/third century BC. Contemporary scholars have likewise
assumed that Pyrrhonists followed Pyrrho. But Hopkins
philosophy professor Richard Bett has
closely examined the textual evidence and come to a different
conclusion: Pyrrho's actual thinking, ironically, would have
excluded him from the group of skeptics that later took his
name.

Bett puts forth his argument in Pyrrho, His Antecedents, and
His Legacy (Oxford, 2000), which traces the ancestral line,
so to speak, of Pyrrho's ideas, and examines the true nature of
those ideas as well as their legacy. Says Bett, "The conventional
wisdom has been that the views of Pyrrho were the same as those
of the Pyrrhonists, just less sophisticated." This idea was based
on scant textual evidence, because Pyrrho evidently wrote
nothing, at least nothing that has survived. The philosopher's

thoughts must be gleaned from the fragmentary writing of a
disciple, Timon; the most important summary of Timon's work is by
a later writer, Aristocles.

Bett says that, based on Aristocles, Pyrrho believed--and stated-
-that nothing in life was determinate. But as Bett points out,
that means Pyrrho was taking a firm metaphysical position.
Reality, said Pyrrho, cannot be determined because nothing is
ever invariable. Period.

For Pyrrho to hold such a pronounced view, says Bett, "was an
opinionated thing to do, and [to the Pyrrhonists] one should not
have an opinion." Thus, asserts Bett, the philosopher
paradoxically would not have qualified as one of his own
followers. Bett's book, according to its author, "is the case for
a non-skeptical Pyrrho."

If this view is correct, why did the Pyrrhonists take Pyrrho as
inspiration and founding figure? Bett found an answer in Pyrrho's
legacy. The philosopher himself quickly faded to obscurity after
his death in 272 B.C. His philosophy, or something like it, was
revived around the first century B.C. by a philosopher named
Aenesidemus, who took Pyrrho as the figurehead for a brand of
skepticism. As Bett reads him, Aenesidemus's thinking was
actually closer to Pyrrho's own beliefs than the later version of
Pyrrhonism described by Sextus Empiricus. But unlike Pyrrho, says
Bett, "Aenesidemus would not have been willing to assert that
reality was indeterminate, but he was willing to rule out various
definite characteristics as being part of reality." That is,
saying what something was not was permissible.

But to later Pyrrhonists, especially Sextus Empiricus, who wrote
On Pyrrhonism in the second/third century A.D., even this
sort of negative statement was suspect. Pyrrhonism had evolved to
a point at which Aenesidemus, and especially Pyrrho, would not
have been regarded as sufficiently skeptical. Bett notes that
Sextus rarely mentions Pyrrho. The Pyrrhonists were no longer
paying attention to Pyrrho. --DK

Time and Setting: Wednesday afternoon, course 220.302,
"Workshop in Acting and Directing."

Scene: Actor John Astin '52, best known for his role as
Gomez in the television series The Addams Family, sits
facing the stage of the Merrick Barn theater, as three Hopkins
students on stage, without scripts, finish a short scene from
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. A dozen classmates
watch from the audience.

Astin: [Leans toward stage and looks at the students]
Jen, we got a great sense of the character. [She smiles and
blushes.] All three of you accomplished a lot, but now go farther
with it. Use simple reality--yourself talking to someone else, to
break the "acting" pattern. Continue to speak to one another as
yourself and not as a character. You will find rhythms
developing, new attitudes developing. And they will create
validity. [Turns around to class.] Didn't you feel there was
something valid in what they were doing? [Laughs.] I dare anyone
to say no now that I've said all this!

Actor John Astin, teaching
students from the director's chair.Photo by
Louis Rosenstock

[In the front row, a student, with legs stretched across seats,
raises his hand.]

Student: I thought you were connecting but I felt like energy was
lost in trying to keep cool.

Astin: Exactly! That's true. That's true. But you don't
worry about that at first. As they continue to rehearse, energy
will develop and come through, but it won't be a phony one. It
won't be one forced upon them. [Pauses. Looks at audience.] All
right. Who's next?

Postscript: Astin, a visiting professor at Hopkins who
taught three sections of acting and directing this semester,
planned to perform his one-man play, Edgar Allan Poe, Once
Upon a Midnight, as part of the April dedication of the new
Student Arts Center at Homewood. Proceeds from the performance
will help fund a fellowship in
The Writing Seminars, the department
that offered Astin's course.
--Emily Carlson (MA '01)